Thursday, December 16, 2010

it is COLD!

Oh sure, if you are in Canada (hi SciFi!) or Wisconsin (hey Sherri!) or other northern regions I am probably warmer than you. But for the mid Atlantic region, it’s freaking COLD out!

We don’t see daily temps in the low 20s until Jan or Feb. Normally we are busy complaining that 40 degrees and rainy sucks for holiday weather but for the past 6-8 days we’ve all been ranting on about the COLD.

My heat pump has not stopped running except maybe for a few hours on Sunday when it reached 33 outside.

There is a draft. I cannot track down the draft. I’ve blocked off every window & door, even inside doors, with beach towels and there is a still cold breeze blowing around my ankles in the kitchen & living room.

Plus if you get within 2 feet of any of the sliding glass doors you can feel the chill coming off 64 square feet of freezing glass, despite the heavy curtains.

We have a woodstove in the living room & when a fire is lit that room gets WARM. Like take your sweater off & go find some shorts warm.

But keep that sweater and possibly some long johns, mittens and a hat handy in case you want to go into any other room in the house. Because that 2 foot cinder block wall not only blocks wifi signal, it traps heat as well.

And the thermostat is in the living room. With the wood stove.

Oh we turn the fan on the heat pump on, and the air return is in the living room to suck up the hot air & blow it through the house. But it’s in the opposite corner of the room (damn hippy stoner builders) & is surrounded by my desk. We’ve discussed putting one closer to the woodstove & blocking this one but 13 years into living here, it’s still just a conversation we have on cold days.

So practically no warm air from the stove reaches other parts of the house, though a few strategically placed box fans do force some of it into the kitchen where it encounters those cold slate tiles & disappears.

That is assuming the fans remain by the door.

Havoc & Mayhem have discovered that you can throw paper airplanes over the fan and the air will carry them great distances. So the fans get aimed at whatever clone or dino group are the bad guys and then planes bombard them.

Meaning no heat ever leaves the living room & because it’s now 88 in the living room, the heat pump doesn’t run and it quickly gets very cold in other rooms. Due to the soil insulation it never gets lower than about 55-60 but while that is fine outside in the fall, it’s biting cold inside in winter when you need to pee.

You shouldn’t need to wear a parka to go pee in your own home.

Basically we only have a fire for a short time on weekends because none of the bathrooms are anywhere near the living room.

I’m off to Lowes to look at space heaters today. A couple well placed ones might make having the wood stove running long term a viable option. Or at least one for the bathroom

LOL! Great post today. I feel your pain, even though it's only 40 degrees here, that seems cold to us. And our thermostat box sits at a jaunty 45 degree angle b/c it's falling off the wall. Which means it has a loose connection to the heater, which means it only goes on occasionally (usually when I pound on it, use some pop dots to reposition it, jiggle it, pray, etc. - a process which takes about 20 minutes). So I superheat the house to 70 degrees in the morning when I get it working and then wait for it to warm up outside!Rinda

We have to have space heaters in each of the kids' rooms (I turn them on to heat the room up with the door closed.. and then turn them off while they sleep), our room, and dining room We need a bigger furnace. Which is way more expensive than what we can handle right now. :/

unfortunately we only think of buying them in weather like this, which is when everyone else also thinks that & since we live the furthest away from Wal Mart they are all sold out when we get there. Except the $200 models that use kerosene